21 February 2011

Provincal - Bicycle Infrastructure

I really should get out more. I rarely get to the provinces - whether Danish or otherwise. That's just me. I prefer cities. Once in a while, however, I find myself out there. In the Danish town of Frederikssund last summer I spotted these two simple traffic calming measures. Simply narrowing the street with islands and only allowing for one way traffic through the squeeze.
The bicycle lane, of course, allows for free passage. In a small Danish town like this there is often a combination of painted lines, as above, and physically separated cycle tracks - depending on the traffic volume of the street.

On a trip to small town in Jutland for a football tournament that my son was playing in, it was reassuring to see that along every road there were cycle tracks - and they were cleared of snow even way out there. Again, bi-directional tracks in some places and - if the traffic volume is sufficient - a track on either side of the highway.
With over 10,000 km of bicycle lanes, paths and tracks in Denmark, you can get pretty much anywhere you need to go on a bicycle. Whether between two small towns or all the way from east to west/north to south.
This cycle track connects two towns - one of 7000 inhabitants and the other with 10,000 - that are about 20 km apart.

They put similar traffic calming measures in a town I used to live in and some of the residents were upset because they were sure that people would collide head on. Apparently, bull riders don't trust other bull riders very much. Or they don't know how to take turns. Or both.

We have similar chicanes for cars in Exeter (UK), and in several other places in the area. To save money(?) in some of the chicanes, there is no cycle track for the direction that has priority, so cyclists are treated as vehicles. This is not always ideal! Some of the chicanes also are humped to slow vehicles.

Many cycle campaigners in the UK, especially those who adopt the vehicular cycling approach, hate pinch-points with cycle bypasses. They say they would prefer just to go through the pinchpoint on the road itself. They argue that cars tend to approach these too fast if they can see a car coming the other way and they want to get through before the oncoming car rather than slow down. As soon as they are through the pinch, they move back to the left (this being the UK) straight away as the road goes back to two-way, and they may then collide with a cyclist who has passed through the bypass and whom they have not seen. Better to sit squarely in front of them and slow them down, stay in plain sight.

This may simply be due to the appalling design of almost all our cycle facilities, like the pics shown above, but I don't think there are enough schemes like this in the UK to make a sound judgement.

Chicanes are pointless because they only slow traffic in one spot. Why not narrow the entire roadway? That way, traffic is slowed along the entire stretch of roadway, and paving costs are reduced by half.

Kilometres cycled by Copenhageners so far today

Copenhagenize.com is the blog of Copenhagenize Design Company. Online since 2007 and highlighting the cycling life in Copenhagen and around the world.

40 years ago Copenhagen was just as car-clogged as anywhere else but now 41% of the population arriving at work or education do so on bicycles, from all over the Metro area. 55% of Copenhageners themselves use bicycles each day. They all use over 1000 km of bicycle lanes in Greater Copenhagen for their journeys. Copenhagenizing is possible anywhere.